Section 31 - The Maquis
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Was someone behind Captain Maxwell's attacks on the Cardassians? Were the same group responsible for the creation of the Maquis?


Disclaimer - I don't own Star Trek in any form.

Feel free to leave me some feedback and maybe some inspiration about where else I can take this series of Starfleet's darkest secret.

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Section 31 - The Maquis.

In the office that he had taken for his work in Section 31 - the organisation itself did not have any fixed HQ because of their work, and indeed sometimes they just used conventional offices in Starfleet HQ in San Francisco out of respect of the expression _"the best place to hide something is in plain sight," _but they always had to be careful due to the potential of a Starfleet Admiral getting too curious for their own good and stumbling across something that could spell their own door - Director Sloan was busy reading the reports he was getting from various ships close to the Federation-Cardassian border.

The Federation council were currently condemning the new movement known as the Maquis; some of them believed like Admiral Nechayev the Maquis were "irresponsible hotheads," but truthfully Sloan saw them for the people they were rather than a bunch of traitors. As a member of Section 31, Sloan had conducted many operations into Cardassian territory, and he pitied the colonists on the DMZ. While he loved the Federation and everything it represented even though 31's foundation existed in the original Starfleet treaty and predated the Federation, Sloan was not blind by the faults and there were quite a few of them.

Nechayev was angry by the rise of the Maquis and the threats to the treaty, and many of the Federation Council were just as annoyed, but truthfully what did they think was going to happen? Did they really think there would be no consequence, that the colonists were a bunch of Starfleet jarheads who'd jump to attention just because some jumped up admiral told them what to do?

No, people did not work like that, something the cold and icy admiral did not understand. Sloan shook his head at the mess the woman had gotten into.

Nechayev and many other Starfleet officers failed to understand when you worked hard for something important you would refuse to let it be snatched out of your hands by people who had never even looked them straight in the face and told them what was going on. Sloan had dozens of operatives on both sides of the border monitoring the situation to make sure nothing happened that would cause problems for the Federation in the long term, and he wasn't really surprised the Cardassians were already pushing the treaty to see exactly what the Federation could take, but while the Council were reluctant to see the truth the colonists were not.

They were frightened. Many of them were arming themselves to defend themselves and their properties, the places they had worked for years to get before the Federation just handed the lot over to the Cardassian Empire. They were frightened because the Cardassians did not observe the boundaries, and already many people had died. Sloan wasn't surprised they had banded together, but even he was surprised when the Maquis itself had been formed.

Already they had caused several problems for Starfleet; a large number of Starfleet officers, particularly those who had grown up in the region in question, had publicly spoken out about the treaty, some of them had resigned their commissions, arguing about the treaty which put them under scrutiny by their superior officers who either didn't want to know or simply did not care about what Federation citizens living close to the DMZ were going through, or they simply went AWOL to become members of the Maquis when they realised for themselves just arguing was not going to be the solution to the problem, using their Starfleet experience to great effect while some of the more forward-thinking members of the organisation took with them technology like weapons and medical supplies to ensure the Maquis held out as long as it could.

Sloan stood up from his desk and walked over to the small table that he had a large glass jug of water sitting on it; he'd had the table set a fair distance away so then he would be able to get up and think about the various problems surrounding him and his organisation.

Truthfully Sloan was not really surprised by the rise of the Maquis. In fact, he had some of his operatives inspire the creation of the guerrilla movement in the first place. Yes, he had committed treason, at least in the mind of a short-sighted individual, but truthfully Sloan's reasons were more complex than that. And besides, Section 31 didn't answer to anybody, so who was going to find out?

The Federation Council had brought the whole mess onto themselves. It was bad enough that during the war against Cardassia, the planets that were in the DMZ were under constant threat against the Cardassian military, which not only soured the colonists living in that part of space against the Cardassian people on the whole, but the fact that they had been betrayed by people on the Council who didn't have a clue what was going on out there was even worse.

When they had handed over the colonies in the DMZ to fulfil their treaty's promises to the Cardassian Union, they had risked the creation of the Maquis anyway. But the Section 31 operatives inside Cardassian space reported various plans to find some way to force the colonists away from the planets while keeping their hands clean so then the Council would not be forced to despatch Starfleet to stop the invasion.

It had become widely known the seeds of the Maquis had come in the form of Captain Benjamin Maxwell, who had turned renegade and used his ship to attack the Cardassians, which nearly ignited yet another war with the Cardassians.

Maxwell had claimed the Cardassians were using their science station in the Cuellar system as a front to stock arms, but he couldn't prove it. And he would also have needed to wait months for a full and in-depth investigation into seeing if the station and indeed other outposts in the Cardassian Union were being used as arms dumps in preparation for a new war.

But Section 31 had already known about the arms dumps in the Union. They had been aware of it from the very beginning thanks to their contacts and agents in the Cardassian military, and they had been in the process of tracing the various arms dumps. The problem was in what they would do about it. Section 31 was good at clandestine operations, but its operatives and members were aware of the dangers of carrying them out. They could have arranged for the destruction of the dumps, they might even have sabotaged the ships, and they could not risk any of that without the Obsidian Order getting involved, and if that happened it would do incalculable damage to the Section 31 organisation. Sloan had made the decision, risky as it was, to have the information find its way to Maxwell.

He was a perfect choice, really; after losing his family to the Cardassians, the good officer didn't have a reason to like or even trust the Union. He had exposed the weapons and thanks to the intervention of the Enterprise, a massive blow had ensued, and it had set the Cardassian military back a little bit. But it was a setback and the news had alarmed both Starfleet command and the Federation Council since they knew the Cardassians were not the saints they were portraying themselves as.

Unfortunately, three years later, the treaty was finally finished. No-one was happy about it. So many compromises had to be made to the Cardassians, who were such a coldly greedy race, and they had squeezed one concession after another from the diplomats, although Starfleet command believed it was the best that they would have. But they hadn't seen that by forcing their own colonists to move, the colonists would come to think the Federation had betrayed them.

Yes, the Maquis would have appeared in a different form with or without Sloan's interference, only in an unaltered state the Maquis would have been driven out or destroyed anyway while the Cardassians merely gained a stronger foothold into Federation territory because they would have been taken by surprise when the Cardassian colonists who were being armed by their Central Command in preparation for the attacks which were being planned months in advance, a surprise which would have seen the Maquis destroyed before it had even truly begun.

When that had happened, the colonists could merely claim they were defending themselves. The Obsidian Order and the Central Command had even come up with plausible cover stories already. Sloan had already seen a fair few of them, and he had to admit they were not some badly conceived plans or excuses either; a lot of time and effort had gone into making them as legal as possible.

With the Maquis gone and Starfleet indecisive about the treaty being violated, the Cardassians would simply have to walk across the border, claiming whatever planet they wanted, and Section 31 had already gathered plans which showed the Cardassians' plans to enter Federation space.

Sloan, as the head of Section 31, could not allow that to happen. He knew the Federation Council wanted the Cardassian Union to become part of the United Federation of Planets, but he knew they would not want their 'paradise' to become the Bajoran occupation on a galactic scale. Section 31's purpose was to protect the Federation at all costs, and if that meant undermining a treaty then so be it.

With that in mind, Sloan had made arrangements for some of the intelligence collected by his organisation to be slowly filtered into the growing Maquis. None of the resistance fighters knew where this intelligence was coming from, and it was intelligence and not unfounded rumour, but solid fact. That was it. Once the information was filtered through into the Maquis, the rest was history.

The biggest problem was exposing the weapons the Central Command was delivering to the DMZ, and after a great deal of thought Section 31 decided to hand information over to Starfleet officer Commander Calvin Hudson which gave him clues about Cardassian weapons being supplied to the colonists through intermediaries, the Lissepians which caused enough noise in itself, but it was the destruction of a Cardassian merchant freighter the Bok-Nor which was supplying the colonists with military-grade weapons which really sparked the conflict. The Cardassian colonists had been taken by surprise by the destruction and they had taken it upon themselves to attack their opposite numbers. Section 31 was just amazed that the Starfleet investigators had just assumed the Maquis had gotten hold of the explosive elements for the bomb which destroyed the Bok-Nor by using their own resources.

They didn't. Section 31 had provided the mercassium for the job, which pointed to Federation involvement which would cause tensions between the two powers in itself since the Federation never shared that technology with anybody, and the docking schedule of the freighter to the Maquis. With that knowledge, they were able to see the Cardassian freighter's last chance to be destroyed would be on Deep Space 9.

Sloan was actually quite pleased with his work; not only was the Maquis thriving right now, albeit in a limited capacity due to seceding from the Federation, but they had enough knowledge in order to keep themselves alive. And with the presence of numerous Starfleet officers helping them covertly or openly, such as Ro Laren, Chakotay, and Calvin Hudson, the chances were they would be able to hold out for longer while they frustrated the Cardassian Union.

The only thing that worried him now was the potential for the Maquis to go too far, but if that happened then Sloan would effortlessly find a way to end them. He had already sent a number of operatives into the Maquis, and they were ordered to discover any plot which could potentially cause harm to the Federation. The operatives were more the eyes and ears of Section 31, but Sloan would listen to them, and he would make plans about what could come. Section 31 had been forging organisations like the Maquis for years, it wouldn't take much to bring them down either.


End file.
